The sad part comes when in 50 years this vault is eagerly opened and found to only contain many many dead weevils.
To be honest, if I had to choose between a barren wasteland with no hope of regenerating plant life for millions of years and the potential for some surviving seeds, I'm going to have to go with the lesser of the two weevils.
The problem isn't that it's below sea level, it's that the entire city is sinking. Without the seasonal overflow of the Mississippi, there's no new silt being built up to replace the silt that's settling. Backfilling won't help much because the fill will eventually settle, too.
In fact, this problem isn't unique to Louisiana, it's affecting most of Southern Louisiana. It's the reason why wetlands are disappearing and why there's so much coastal erosion. When the Army Corps of Engineers tried to control the Mississippi, they met limited success at great cost to the ecosystem in the region.
New Orleans, and Louisana as a whole, is facing a very severe environmental problem with complex geologic issues. Filling the area is a very temporary solution and saying "don't live there" would render nearly half a state uninhabitable (not to mention destroy nearly the entire Cajun culture). There isn't really an "easy" answer.
Disclaimer: IANAGOOES (I am not a geologist or other environmental scientist) but I did take some geology classes at Tulane!
I know what you said was a joke but it's actually not far off. I'm a libertarian because I'm pissed off at all the religious crap and special interest spending done by the Republican party.
I want a SMALL government. Not a large government whose policies are dictated by the religious right and **AAs.
Mandrake club is currently less than or equal to 28% of their revenue, not the 80% you claim. From their latest quarterly summary:
Product sales amounted to 51% of revenues, enterprise services 21% and online sales and services 28%.
So you're dead wrong about where their money comes from.
Also, your numbers are slightly off. According to that same report, Mandrake is worth about 40 million euros (market value); that's about 50 million USD. Sure, they're not the size of RedHat but that's one of the reasons I like them.
I don't know where you got the loss figure from but I bought the stock at 2.1 euros. On 4 August 2004, it was 2.39 Euros. It is now 7.60 Euros. Unless Canadian math is different than American math, that's a 317% growth in the period from August 2004 to February 2005. Overall, that's a growh of about 361%. That's not a bad return over the 2.5 years that I've owned the stock
Representing your opinion and numbers you pull out of your ass as fact is embarassing when people call you on it, eh?;-)
And oh, by the way, I happen to like M. LeMarois. He's always been cordial and straightforward in my dealings with him and he seems to have a good idea of where the company should be headed. That, of course, is just my opinion.
How do they have the money to do this? Werent they almost bankrupt about a year ago?
First, their financial situation was never as bad as it sounded. They had no money and couldn't fulfil debt obligations because a previous board of directors had moved them into to many business areas that were too far removed from their core business model (which has always been selling support and services to corporations).
Once they axed the former board, ceased unprofitable ventures, and got back to their core profitable model, things quickly improved. Their financial reports and quarterly summaries on their website go in to much more detail.
Secondly, they beefed up their Mandrake Club offering. It's currently a substantial portion of their revenue (I want to say 20-25%).
Third, released a bunch of stock a few years ago in an attempt to raise capital to renegotiate and pay off debt.
Lastly, the rules governing bankruptcy in France are far more forgiving and lenient than they are in the US. Mandrake wisely used the time and mechanisms that the bankruptcy filing awarded them and they're now seeing the benefits as they are on extremely sound financial footing.
By the way, yes, I am a shareholder and this news makes me very happy. The leadership at Mandrakesoft over the past few years has been excellent and I have faith in their ability to grow their company. Besides, with a 300% rise in their stock price in the last 4 months, I can't complain too much, now can I? =P
Likewise, if you use Win2003 for playing Half-Life 2, then you get the poor performance you deserve.
That's actually a dirty lie. Server2003 is the best desktop OS Microsoft has ever made. Granted, you need to mess with more settings than a typical installation but I find it infinitely more stable and it runs games way smoother than XP.
That being said, I've often toyed with the idea of benchmarking the two and comparing the results to see if its' just a perceived difference. In the end, I just can't bring myself to go through the trouble of installing and configuring XP. I'm totally happy with 2k3 and that's all that matters to me.
Funny how they've got all that money for what they did, and managed to go from a few hundred users in the first few months to hundreds of thousands (not to mention the countless people that read and don't bother with use accounts).
I'll probably get modded offtopic for this but seeing as how the original topic really isn't that interesting, what the hell?
Slashdot rose so fast so high because geeks are lazy. Not necessarily in the "sit in the recliner and yell for someone to get them another beer" kind of lazy but in the "work smarter, not harder" kind of lazy.
Slashdot aggregates news that we, as a community, are generally interested in and they do a fairly good job at it. While they might not get every geeky news story out there, they probably get 85-90% of the big ones and some smaller ones thrown in for color. This saves us visiting a lot of different sites to get the news we want by putting it in one convienient format.
The thing about Slashdot (that autopr0n touched on) is that, in terms of the web, it's ancient and it hasn't changed much over the years. That's not necessarily a bad thing because they still do a pretty good job at it but they've gotten a little stale at it. There really hasn't been a lot of innovation or improvement in some areas of the site that need some attention.
I find it amusing how everyone thinks they could do a better job, but when you only have very few people sorting through thousands of story submissions, it isn't that easy.
This comment flys in the face of the first one. They got all this money before the bust and what exactly happened to it? They added new hardware and added bandwidth (which was certainly a great thing at the time) but they didn't do a whole ton of improvement to the actual workflow. Now that the money has dried up, I'm sure it's much harder to do.
Secondly, it's not so amusing that everyone thinks that they can do a better job but very few people actually do it. Most people who read this site had jobs and other commitments in life. The Slashdot crew gets paid to think about these things for 8 hours a day. Like you said earlier, they're the ones with the financial incentive to improve (i.e. they managed to get money... making it better would probably get them more money.
Anyhow, this is just an idle rant. One of those things that has kind of bothered me over the years. For what it's worth, I really do support the Slashdot crew and everything they do. They've built an amazing site and have managed to maintain it through some rough times. For that, hats off. =)
I'm not a HUGE fan of the season 3 story arc (it's all a bit far flung) but I think they would have done better if they just stuck to it the entire season.
Towards the beginning of the season, we had 2 or 3 episodes setting up the arc for the rest of the season and then... 2 or 3 episodes that had nothing at all to do with the story arc. They did nothing to move the plot forward and barely (if at all) mentioned that Earth had been the subject of an unprovoked sneak attack.
Now that the season is nearing the end, the last bunch of episodes have stuck to the arc and have overall been pretty good*.
* with the following exceptions:
- The "future" (past?) Enterprise - that was just campy, lame, and predictable. Captain from the future comes back and will stop at nothing to ensure that past mistakes do not repeat themselves and in the process almost screws up the present mission even more - yeah, I've never seen or heard of that plot before... BZZZZT WRONG.
- Flox's new Vulcan methodone clinic. For the love of baby jesus, could they have thought of anything more inane and pointless to just throw in there? Yeah, she's spent a lot of time around humans and no time around Vulcans for the past 3 years - she's acclaimating and changing as a person. We don't need to turn her into a frikken junkie to account for that.
This has Berman's filthy, uncreative, unimaginative, bastard hand written all over it. It's like your boss coming in and looking at your web application and saying "Where's the blinking words? I saw a website once that had words that BLINK. I think it's a good way to draw people's attention to our message (or better yet "mission"). Add some right away."
Now I don't know enough about Everquest et al. to make this thought coherent, but I'll try. Presumably there are organisations (guilds?) made up of co-operating players. These have assets, generate revenue, trade, etc.
So, they should be able to issue stock! Seriously, why not?
I belong to one of the high end raiding guilds in Everquest. Honestly, we'd never do anything like that because for most of us platinum has lost all meaning.
The monsters we kill all drop items that have a "NO DROP" flag set. This means the item cannot be dropped onto the ground, traded with other players, or sold to other players after it is taken ("looted") off the monsters corpse. Basically, once you loot it, it belongs to your character for the rest of that character's life. If you no longer need it, the only thing you can do with it is store it in your bank or destroy it.
We distribute these items with a system called DKP (dragon kill points) where you earn points for each raid you attend. Almost all of our gear (weapons, armor, etc) come from raids so we rarely trade with other players. We just have no need to.
When someone (i.e. an individual player) needs platinum for things like tradeskills, they usually find a piece of gear that is droppable (i.e. does not have the NO DROP flag set) and is very hard for a casual player to attain but fairly easy for a small group of us to attain. One or two of these items can be gotten with a couple hours of work and can easily net over 100,000 platinum pieces.
First, I want to thank Gerv for being the whipping boy on Slashdot over this issue. That takes balls man, my hat's off to you.;-)
Second, I'd like to offer a little constructive criticism. The Mozilla Foundation is increasing the cost (in terms of work that has to be done) to release a distro. By itself, it might not seem like a lot to contact the Mozilla Foundation and work something out but what happens if you have to "work out" things with every piece of software you want to include in your distro? Right now, these headaches only exist with XFree86 and FireFox but what happens if other popular packages like KDE, Gnome, Gaim, Xine, OO.o, etc. all took stances like this? No one would ever release a distro because they'd be too busy "working things out" with each and every project they wish to include. This doesn't even take into account the licensing complications for the distro as a whole.
Please, as an organization, take a big step back and consider what you're doing. Thanks for listening. -- Dave
Some may chalk this up to coincidence, but I see two possible conclusions: either the writer was a psychic or the Hollywood illuminati really DO dictate the flow of modern history! Since more and more movie studios are using linux, I think it's clear that Hollywood has already made up their mind on the SCO issue.
I, for one, welcome our new foreign-born, taco-shilling, linux-using overlords.
Please note: tounge was firmly implanted in cheek while writing this post. Thank you.
Slashdot Mirror
The sad part comes when in 50 years this vault is eagerly opened and found to only contain many many dead weevils.
To be honest, if I had to choose between a barren wasteland with no hope of regenerating plant life for millions of years and the potential for some surviving seeds, I'm going to have to go with the lesser of the two weevils.
PEI recent population: 135,294
*looks puzzled*
Note that the parent post said "more than one human... not sheep.
=P
The problem isn't that it's below sea level, it's that the entire city is sinking. Without the seasonal overflow of the Mississippi, there's no new silt being built up to replace the silt that's settling. Backfilling won't help much because the fill will eventually settle, too.
In fact, this problem isn't unique to Louisiana, it's affecting most of Southern Louisiana. It's the reason why wetlands are disappearing and why there's so much coastal erosion. When the Army Corps of Engineers tried to control the Mississippi, they met limited success at great cost to the ecosystem in the region.
New Orleans, and Louisana as a whole, is facing a very severe environmental problem with complex geologic issues. Filling the area is a very temporary solution and saying "don't live there" would render nearly half a state uninhabitable (not to mention destroy nearly the entire Cajun culture). There isn't really an "easy" answer.
Disclaimer: IANAGOOES (I am not a geologist or other environmental scientist) but I did take some geology classes at Tulane!
The solution is simple. Put the emergency exits in the non-smoking area. The smokers were all going to die of cancer and lung/heart disease anyway. =)
I know what you said was a joke but it's actually not far off. I'm a libertarian because I'm pissed off at all the religious crap and special interest spending done by the Republican party. I want a SMALL government. Not a large government whose policies are dictated by the religious right and **AAs.
If they're so concerned with security patched, why doesn't it prompt you to remove IE? Oh, I know... because that might make it useful!
Facts, please.
Mandrake club is currently less than or equal to 28% of their revenue, not the 80% you claim. From their latest quarterly summary:
Product sales amounted to 51% of revenues, enterprise services 21% and online sales and services 28%.
So you're dead wrong about where their money comes from.
Also, your numbers are slightly off. According to that same report, Mandrake is worth about 40 million euros (market value); that's about 50 million USD. Sure, they're not the size of RedHat but that's one of the reasons I like them.
I don't know where you got the loss figure from but I bought the stock at 2.1 euros. On 4 August 2004, it was 2.39 Euros. It is now 7.60 Euros. Unless Canadian math is different than American math, that's a 317% growth in the period from August 2004 to February 2005. Overall, that's a growh of about 361%. That's not a bad return over the 2.5 years that I've owned the stock
Representing your opinion and numbers you pull out of your ass as fact is embarassing when people call you on it, eh? ;-)
And oh, by the way, I happen to like M. LeMarois. He's always been cordial and straightforward in my dealings with him and he seems to have a good idea of where the company should be headed. That, of course, is just my opinion.
How do they have the money to do this? Werent they almost bankrupt about a year ago?
First, their financial situation was never as bad as it sounded. They had no money and couldn't fulfil debt obligations because a previous board of directors had moved them into to many business areas that were too far removed from their core business model (which has always been selling support and services to corporations).
Once they axed the former board, ceased unprofitable ventures, and got back to their core profitable model, things quickly improved. Their financial reports and quarterly summaries on their website go in to much more detail.
Secondly, they beefed up their Mandrake Club offering. It's currently a substantial portion of their revenue (I want to say 20-25%).
Third, released a bunch of stock a few years ago in an attempt to raise capital to renegotiate and pay off debt.
Lastly, the rules governing bankruptcy in France are far more forgiving and lenient than they are in the US. Mandrake wisely used the time and mechanisms that the bankruptcy filing awarded them and they're now seeing the benefits as they are on extremely sound financial footing.
By the way, yes, I am a shareholder and this news makes me very happy. The leadership at Mandrakesoft over the past few years has been excellent and I have faith in their ability to grow their company. Besides, with a 300% rise in their stock price in the last 4 months, I can't complain too much, now can I? =P
Supposing for a second that the campground did have an internet cafe (i've never seen one that did, but I guess they could be out there)
Apparently, you haven't camped in Texas. :-P
Likewise, if you use Win2003 for playing Half-Life 2, then you get the poor performance you deserve.
That's actually a dirty lie. Server2003 is the best desktop OS Microsoft has ever made. Granted, you need to mess with more settings than a typical installation but I find it infinitely more stable and it runs games way smoother than XP.
That being said, I've often toyed with the idea of benchmarking the two and comparing the results to see if its' just a perceived difference. In the end, I just can't bring myself to go through the trouble of installing and configuring XP. I'm totally happy with 2k3 and that's all that matters to me.
JFGI (just freaking Google it):
Google Search
Some nice pictures:
Funny how they've got all that money for what they did, and managed to go from a few hundred users in the first few months to hundreds of thousands (not to mention the countless people that read and don't bother with use accounts).
I'll probably get modded offtopic for this but seeing as how the original topic really isn't that interesting, what the hell?
Slashdot rose so fast so high because geeks are lazy. Not necessarily in the "sit in the recliner and yell for someone to get them another beer" kind of lazy but in the "work smarter, not harder" kind of lazy.
Slashdot aggregates news that we, as a community, are generally interested in and they do a fairly good job at it. While they might not get every geeky news story out there, they probably get 85-90% of the big ones and some smaller ones thrown in for color. This saves us visiting a lot of different sites to get the news we want by putting it in one convienient format.
The thing about Slashdot (that autopr0n touched on) is that, in terms of the web, it's ancient and it hasn't changed much over the years. That's not necessarily a bad thing because they still do a pretty good job at it but they've gotten a little stale at it. There really hasn't been a lot of innovation or improvement in some areas of the site that need some attention.
I find it amusing how everyone thinks they could do a better job, but when you only have very few people sorting through thousands of story submissions, it isn't that easy.
This comment flys in the face of the first one. They got all this money before the bust and what exactly happened to it? They added new hardware and added bandwidth (which was certainly a great thing at the time) but they didn't do a whole ton of improvement to the actual workflow. Now that the money has dried up, I'm sure it's much harder to do.
Secondly, it's not so amusing that everyone thinks that they can do a better job but very few people actually do it. Most people who read this site had jobs and other commitments in life. The Slashdot crew gets paid to think about these things for 8 hours a day. Like you said earlier, they're the ones with the financial incentive to improve (i.e. they managed to get money... making it better would probably get them more money.
Anyhow, this is just an idle rant. One of those things that has kind of bothered me over the years. For what it's worth, I really do support the Slashdot crew and everything they do. They've built an amazing site and have managed to maintain it through some rough times. For that, hats off. =)
The Simpsons suck! That dude who created Futurama is so much cooler!
*wink*
If you go to BugMeNot.com and enter http://slashdot.org, you get:
;-)
CmdrTaco
password
Sheesh, I'd expect better from him!
I've got a bad feeling about this.
A degree is merely a university's endorsement of your knowledge. Nothing more, nothing less.
I always thought it was a receipt for $120,000 paid to my university (i.e. the most expensive piece of paper I'll ever buy)
How long do you suppose it'll be before someone starts using this to send an ASCII-art goatse.cx guy in response to pings?
http://www.asciipr0n.com/pr0n/morepr0n/pr0n65.txt
Not very long at all... =P
I'm not a HUGE fan of the season 3 story arc (it's all a bit far flung) but I think they would have done better if they just stuck to it the entire season.
... 2 or 3 episodes that had nothing at all to do with the story arc. They did nothing to move the plot forward and barely (if at all) mentioned that Earth had been the subject of an unprovoked sneak attack.
Towards the beginning of the season, we had 2 or 3 episodes setting up the arc for the rest of the season and then
Now that the season is nearing the end, the last bunch of episodes have stuck to the arc and have overall been pretty good*.
* with the following exceptions:
- The "future" (past?) Enterprise - that was just campy, lame, and predictable. Captain from the future comes back and will stop at nothing to ensure that past mistakes do not repeat themselves and in the process almost screws up the present mission even more - yeah, I've never seen or heard of that plot before... BZZZZT WRONG.
- Flox's new Vulcan methodone clinic. For the love of baby jesus, could they have thought of anything more inane and pointless to just throw in there? Yeah, she's spent a lot of time around humans and no time around Vulcans for the past 3 years - she's acclaimating and changing as a person. We don't need to turn her into a frikken junkie to account for that.
This has Berman's filthy, uncreative, unimaginative, bastard hand written all over it. It's like your boss coming in and looking at your web application and saying "Where's the blinking words? I saw a website once that had words that BLINK. I think it's a good way to draw people's attention to our message (or better yet "mission"). Add some right away."
Thank you, I'm done venting now. =)
Now I don't know enough about Everquest et al. to make this thought coherent, but I'll try. Presumably there are organisations (guilds?) made up of co-operating players. These have assets, generate revenue, trade, etc.
So, they should be able to issue stock! Seriously, why not?
I belong to one of the high end raiding guilds in Everquest. Honestly, we'd never do anything like that because for most of us platinum has lost all meaning.
The monsters we kill all drop items that have a "NO DROP" flag set. This means the item cannot be dropped onto the ground, traded with other players, or sold to other players after it is taken ("looted") off the monsters corpse. Basically, once you loot it, it belongs to your character for the rest of that character's life. If you no longer need it, the only thing you can do with it is store it in your bank or destroy it.
We distribute these items with a system called DKP (dragon kill points) where you earn points for each raid you attend. Almost all of our gear (weapons, armor, etc) come from raids so we rarely trade with other players. We just have no need to.
When someone (i.e. an individual player) needs platinum for things like tradeskills, they usually find a piece of gear that is droppable (i.e. does not have the NO DROP flag set) and is very hard for a casual player to attain but fairly easy for a small group of us to attain. One or two of these items can be gotten with a couple hours of work and can easily net over 100,000 platinum pieces.
Coolest. Thing. Ever.
And I just used PeaPod the other day too. At this rate, I'll never have to leave the house again. =D
Excuse me while I go set up a cron job to order me a large olive and anchovie pizza every third friday of months starting with J.
Let's hope that 'PlayFair' might appear in some other country now.
In Soviet Russia, Apple plays fair!
(Sort of like, "Why doesn't the Psychic Hotline lady call me?")
That's how it works in Soviet Russia...
First, I want to thank Gerv for being the whipping boy on Slashdot over this issue. That takes balls man, my hat's off to you. ;-)
Second, I'd like to offer a little constructive criticism. The Mozilla Foundation is increasing the cost (in terms of work that has to be done) to release a distro. By itself, it might not seem like a lot to contact the Mozilla Foundation and work something out but what happens if you have to "work out" things with every piece of software you want to include in your distro? Right now, these headaches only exist with XFree86 and FireFox but what happens if other popular packages like KDE, Gnome, Gaim, Xine, OO.o, etc. all took stances like this? No one would ever release a distro because they'd be too busy "working things out" with each and every project they wish to include. This doesn't even take into account the licensing complications for the distro as a whole.
Please, as an organization, take a big step back and consider what you're doing. Thanks for listening. -- Dave
Isn't that quote from the movie Demolition Man? The some one that mentions Arnold Schwarzenegger becoming president after pushing through a to allow foreign-persons to hold that office?
Some may chalk this up to coincidence, but I see two possible conclusions: either the writer was a psychic or the Hollywood illuminati really DO dictate the flow of modern history! Since more and more movie studios are using linux, I think it's clear that Hollywood has already made up their mind on the SCO issue.
I, for one, welcome our new foreign-born, taco-shilling, linux-using overlords.
Please note: tounge was firmly implanted in cheek while writing this post. Thank you.
Natalie Portman covered in hot grits?
Hey... at least it'd make for an interesting /. post. "Hey, guys!!! You'll never guess what I got for Valentine's Day!!!"
Too bad he'd be modded -1, Troll ;-)